Daily Archives: June 21, 2007

You know, not three days after Chip Towers engages in some serious navel gazing about how his poor old paper is being unfairly maligned in some quarters for being biased against Georgia, you get this headline from today’s AJ-C:

Is UGA’s schedule too soft?

This is asked in the context of an SI.com article rating 2007 D-1 football schedules. Georgia’s is ranked fourteenth – not in the conference, not in the Southeast, but nationally. That’s out of 119 schools. Yet somehow we are led to believe that this is a deficiency.

… Which raises the question: when toughness of schedule bears on BCS voters’ minds, do the Dogs play too soft of a schedule to rate serious consideration for major bowl games? Does the fact that many of Georgia’s SEC opponents are thought to be playing tougher schedules diminish the Dogs’ stature as a “powerhouse” program?

Actually, start by trying to figure out what the criteria are for being designated a “most important game”. The headline says “Ten showdowns that could shape the national title picture”, but you have to be seriously deluded to think that FSU-Alabama or Hawaii-Boise State will fall into that category.

Then you get to the fine print:

While we obviously don’t know for sure which teams will live up to their reputation as national-title contenders and which ones will come out of nowhere, we can certainly make an educated guess. And for each of those teams, you can usually identify at least one game — most likely on the road, most likely against a similarly-talented foe — that will make or break that team’s fortune, and in turn, help define the entire course of the coming season. There are also those games that might not necessarily carry title implications but will still prove to be a defining moment, be it as a milestone win for an emerging program or a landmark moment — positive or negative — in a coach’s tenure.

All of which boils down to “whatever Mandel thinks is significant right now.” Which still makes me wonder what Mandel’s smoking. ‘Bama won’t be a serious contender in the SEC West this year, let alone a national contender. If FSU is a serious contender for anything, that Virginia Tech game is likely to loom much larger than the game with Alabama.

Speaking of the Hokies, how do you leave the LSU-Va. Tech game off a list of the ten biggest meetings of the season?

Louisville is listed twice. Cal is listed. Yet no mention of Tennessee, which plays Cal and Florida in the first month of the season.

Here are a few college football stories I’ve seen that aren’t really worthy of posts on their own, but still worth sharing for one reason or another:

Rich Brooks is a wimp. If you wonder why so many people make snide comments about SEC scheduling, here’s a reason. It’s not enough that Kentucky starts its ’07 season off with four straight home games; it’s got to script the order. So the Louisville game has to move from the season opener because…

Barnhart said Kentucky coach Rich Brooks “wants to have a better opportunity to have our players ready. This year, for example, we’re going to go through the process of redeveloping our offensive line. He wants them to have their feet on the ground a little bit.”

Translation: Brooks doesn’t want to have his ass handed to him in the season opener by a top 10 program. Here’s hoping that Barnhart is successful in finding a spot on TV for the game so we can watch Kentucky lose by 40.

Focus, George. Iraq. Immigration. Alberto Gonzales. It’s not like President Bush doesn’t have a lot on his mind these days. Yet he’s still got time to think about Nick Saban.

The president gave Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) a hard time about the wildly exorbitant pay package — $4 million a year – that was recently arranged for the new coach of Shelby’s beloved University of Alabama football team, .

“Richard, how’s that coach doing?” the president asked, according to sources in the room, one of whom said Bush dryly mentioned how the cushy deal must be costing “a lot of taxpayer money” for the citizens of Alabama (one of the poorest states in the nation).

“He’s making a lot of money, more than we’re making,” Shelby acknowledged. “And I hope he’ll produce this fall so we can compete with the University of Texas.”

‘Course, it could be that Bush’s little quip is a remnant of a grudge he might hold against the new coach, NFL hotshot Nick Saban, for dissing Bush by declining his dinner invitation last year because he had to get his Miami Dolphins to training camp early.

Boy, that’s reassuring. Maybe we’ll see Alabama added to the Axis of Evil one day. Let’s hope they don’t need FEMA’s help any time soon.

Where to now, St. Peter’s? This is a story that will make you sad and mad. Sad because you can’t help but feel bad for Taylor’s plight, especially considering the circumstances under which he received the job in the first place. Mad because once again the NCAA proves itself to be one rat bastard of an organization:

The irony is St. Peter’s never wanted to be a football power. The school happily played in Division 3, the NCAA’s lowest class, until 1993.

Then a new NCAA rule prohibited schools such as St. Peter’s from playing basketball in Division 1 if they played football in Division 2 or below. Larger schools complained that smaller members were reaping the financial benefits of top-tier basketball while choosing not to spend some of that money on the most expensive sport of all — football.

Jennifer Kearns, a spokeswoman for the NCAA, said member schools decided they wanted “consistent philosophy of athletics departments.”

Weasel words, nothing more. I’m only surprised that no one bothered to spin this as being good for the kids in some way.

The arts continue to flower in Arkansas. Maybe we need to look at Houston Nutt as an agent of change and Arkansas as 15th century Italy. There’s a real renaissance going on there. Pork Rind Jimmy’s cutting edge journalism, 48 page treatises on how to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain emails and cell phone records, creative lawyering – it’s like watching a bunch of freshly hatched Michelangelos and Machiavellis spreading their wings and taking flight.

And now we can add this to the stew pot. Whatever else you might think about him, it’s clear that when the Nuttster departs the scene in Fayetteville, he will leave behind a community that will have been deeply enriched by the experience.

I wasn’t going to play this game, but with this article in the AJ-C suggesting that it’s more than likely that Munson will only do play by play for Georgia’s home games in 2007, I figure I might as well throw my two cents out there about whom I’d like to see succeed him.

Several of the names I’ve seen suggested are summarized in this post over at The Bulldawg Blawg. Add Buck Belue’s name, too, if you’d like. Chip Caray, also. It sounds like Scott Howard will get a leg up on the competition this year if Larry doesn’t travel, as it’s likely he’ll inherit the play by play role for the ’07 road games.

Call me a contrarian, but I don’t want Munson’s replacement to be someone local for local’s sake. I don’t find any of the folks listed to be particularly memorable as a play by play announcer. Picking someone to try to carry on the Munson tradition, or because he’s a “Georgia guy” isn’t going to work. Larry has a unique voice, one that can’t be recreated and any attempt to continue the vibe is going to come up woefully short.

What I’d rather hear is a consummate pro, somebody who’s very good at painting an accurate picture of what’s happening on the field. Someone who won’t suffer in comparison to our fond memories of Munson because he’s not expected to be a continuation.

I’ve seen a couple of posts suggesting Brad Nessler. That’s not a bad choice at all; he’s a fine play by play guy and as a bonus he does have some local ties as an Atlanta resident. The problem is there’s no way Georgia/WSB could afford him. He’s a featured guy at the ESPN/ABC broadcast empire and too rich for their blood.

But there’s another guy on the ESPN payroll that I like even more than Nessler for the job…

Tons of play by play experience. A Southerner. For my money (and others‘), he’s the best voice in college football network broadcasting today. If you listened to his call of the Chik-Fil-A Bowl, you can tell he’s still got it (his one liner about Charles Johnson’s fumble inducing sack of Glennon was classic). He hasn’t stopped doing radio, either (he called the Fiesta Bowl for ESPN Radio).

And for some reason, ESPN has steadily soured on him over the past few years (he’ll be calling Big XII games this year – lousy time slot), so maybe he’s someone within Georgia’s reach. Yeah, it’s a stretch. But what’s the harm in finding out? He’d be a home run.

Quote Of The Day

“It's definitely different not knowing exactly who it's gonna be, but in a way, I feel like that's good,” he said. “One of my old coaches from Valdosta told me that competition is one of the best coaches. And I feel like, as well as each one of those three guys is performing, they're not gonna do anything but make each other better.” -- Jay Rome, The Red & Black, 3/25/15